Exploring Regina's bomb shelters

Archaeology PhD student Julie Mushynsky is looking into a few relics of Regina's past - bomb shelters, tucked away in houses or backyards. She's looking into why they were built and how many there might be in the city or in Saskatchewan.

When Nathaniel Bowen was a child, he’d explore the bomb shelter in his Old Lakeview backyard. As an adult, it still scares him.

“I still feel the same way when I go down there now,” said Bowen, whose parents have lived in the house his entire life. The bomb shelter was there when they bought the place.

“I’m just afraid the gremlin’s going to jump around the corner and eat me because it’s so creepy,” added Bowen. “You take each step down there with such trepidation, because it’s this black hole and you don’t know what’s around the corner.”

Eight steps down a usually barricaded staircase, there’s a red metal door. Five more steps and six inches of moussey mud is the base of a 200-square-foot room.

It’s dank and pitch black, but spending two hours inside feels “pretty normal” to Julie Mushynsky. She has spent a lot of time in dark, dusty, cockroach-ridden caves doing archeological PhD research on the Western Pacific island of Saipan.

Last weekend, after Google had led her to the bunker in Gail and Ted Bowen’s backyard, Mushynsky surveyed the place.

Made of concrete and steel, it’s plain and relatively massive. Shine a light on the eight-foot-high walls and the only decoration is a pencildrawn profile of a horse.

“It’s a big bomb shelter. I didn’t really expect that to exist in Regina,” said Mushynsky.

Her first local bomb shelter visit – also in Lakeview – was in May. She learned about the “big cellar” in the basement of a Leopold Crescent residence in the tag line of a Leader-Post article. It was an eye-opener; she had never considered that there were bomb shelters in her hometown.

So began a side project researching Regina bomb shelters. That’s on top of her PhD work through Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, where a colleague had studied local bomb shelters.

“It wasn’t really expected that Adelaide would get attacked during World War 2, but they still have these elaborately built bomb shelters,” said Mushynsky. Similarly, she added, “Why were people in Regina – pretty distant from the centre of conflict and unlikely to be bombed – what made people decide to create these shelters?” She hopes to glean more information from people’s memories. So far, she can speculate these structures “would be expensive to build,” so wealthy people may have been more likely to have them.

Mushynsky doesn’t know if they were Second World War constructions by people fearful of German air raids, or products of the Cold War in preparation for a nuclear holocaust.

James Pitsula says there was widespread fear during both eras.

“It was in the news all the time; there was kind of this dangerous situation that people would obviously be afraid of,” said Pitsula, a longtime University of Regina history professor, now retired.

Pitsula was a 12-year-old in Nipawin during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

He remembers the clickety-clack of a reel-to-reel projector as a film instructed his young classmates what to do in the event a nuclear bomb was dropped.

“I remember going home and telling my parents about this film and wondering what was going to happen,” said Pitsula.

Bowen was 10 when the

Cold War ended.

“I remember going to school and seeing the posters about how much money was being spent on nuclear weapons and how precarious the situation was,” said Bowen.

Having a bomb shelter at home was not a comfort.

“(It) almost made me more afraid,” he said.

“You go down there and you see the construction; you see the work and the craftsmanship that went into making it. You know whoever built it must have been very, very afraid that one day he would use it.”

Mushynsky is hoping to view any and all bomb shelters in Regina. If you have one, email juliemushynsky@gmail. com.

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